There are rats in the apartment, but no one ever comes to clear
them out. The heat is broken, and somehow it never seems to get
fixed.

Every city dweller has either dealt with a terrible landlord
or knows someone who has. In New York City, a new nonprofit
called JustFix.nyc is
trying to make that unfortunately common situation a little
easier to deal with.

JustFix's first product is a mobile app that
helps tenants build a legal case around housing issues. The
service is primarily designed to assist people living in
rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments located in
neighborhoods undergoing rapid gentrification — the
people, in other words, who are most at risk of being taken
advantage of by landlords who want them to
leave.

"Our 'aha' moment was sitting in housing court, observing people
for days, and seeing tenants come to court unrepresented with a
bag of miscellaneous papers, flipping through photos on their
phones to illustrate conditions in their apartments, struggling
to tell their story to the judge," says Clement, who previously
worked as a product manager at General Assembly.

The team realized that tenants needed a better way of gathering
and communicating evidence to make their cases.

The app, which is funded by the Robin Hood Foundation and the
Fast Forward Accelerator (an
accelerator for tech nonprofits), is an attempt to create
that evidence-gathering system.

The app starts the process by guiding users to gather
documentation and photos of problems. As they go through the
service, they're provided the opportunity for mediated (and
templated) communication with landlords via texts, emails, and
letters of complaint.

Violations are automatically reported to city and state agencies,
and everything gets logged in a case history that can be
presented in housing court or shared with an advocate (like an
attorney or case worker).

"The case history looks like a Facebook timeline, but it's
pictures of [things like] rats, mold, and cockroaches," says
Clement.

After a year of testing, the app is now available to all New
York City residents. JustFix.nyc has created a partnership
network with over a dozen community partners, which Clement
expects will drive about 5,000 tenants per month to the
app.

Next up: a dashboard that allows community organizers and
attorneys to keep track of open cases and communicate with
tenants.